Europe's first mission to Venus arrived at its destination yesterday after a five-month, 248m-mile trip.

Scientists said the £140m Venus Express satellite completed its final major manoeuvre, where it had to slow down with a precise 49-minute burn of its engines, thereby allowing the planet's gravity to catch it.

The wardrobe-sized, 1.3-tonne spacecraft craft took off last November in a launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. Scientists hope that studying Venus will help inform our models of future climate change on Earth.

Scores of scientists involved in the mission had gathered in the European Space Agency's mission control room in Darmstadt, in the German state of Hesse, well before dawn, their mood a mixture of anticipation and excitement. At 9:08 exactly, the growing nervous silence was broken by sudden cheering and applause: five years of intricate planning and a nail-biting wait through the earliest parts of the mission had come to a successful end. In the control room, an announcement came over the speakers: "Europe is in orbit around Venus".

An hour later, the first dedicated mission to Venus since Nasa's Magellan in 1989 sent back confirmation all had gone to plan and that it had survived the orbital insertion procedure intact. Jean-Jacques Dordain of ESA said: "We have been captured by Venus, it's a great day and a great success - Europe is on the leading seat in the exploration of the solar system."

Fred Taylor of Oxford University, one of the scientists involved in coming up with the idea for Venus Express in 2001, said the mission had overcome the most difficult hurdle. "This European planetary group has come of age with this machine, and Europe is now a major player in this field. We have more wonderful science to come and this is only just beginning. This operation has gone like clockwork."

Venus Express now begins a 500-day mission to map and measure the planet, described by many scientists as Earth's twin gone bad. Venus and Earth are roughly the same size, and were formed at the same time and from the same materials. But while one planet is a watery oasis that is a haven for millions of life forms, the other is a vision of hell: a runaway greenhouse effect means the temperatures on Venus can soar to 450C (hot enough to melt lead), clouds of sulphuric acid blanket the planet in 12-mile thick layers, the atmospheric pressure is 100 times that on Earth and there is no water or oxygen.

"Venus has evolved into our twisted sister or evil twin and we will be able to try and see why," said Andrew Coates of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London. Scientists want to glean data from Venus to inform predictions of climate change on Earth.

Other mysteries on Venus include its lack of a magnetic field. Earth's field protects it from the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun. Because there is no similar protection for Venus, its atmosphere is being leached away at its poles at the rate of 100 tonnes a day. With this loss, it seems paradoxical that its atmospheric pressure could be so high. For that reason, Venus Express will also look for signs of volcanoes on the planet. It is known to have been active in the past and 90% of the surface is covered in lava flows. Scientists suspect that volcanoes continue to spew gases into the atmosphere to replace what is lost.

Yesterday's manoeuvre was described by scientists as the space equivalent of a handbrake turn. "While Venus Express was getting close to Venus we had to slow it down to actually trap it in Venus's orbit," said Dr Coates. "We had to slow it by 3,000 km per hour to trap it into orbit around Venus."

The probe will continue to make small adjustments to its orbit for the next month, resulting in a final path around the planet that passes 250km at its closest point and 66,000km at its furthest point. The first data will be sent back in a matter of months, once the orbit has stabilised.

Professor David Southwood, Esa's director of science, said the space agency was planning returns to Mars and a mission to Mercury. "Our programme in the next few years should have probably a little more emphasis on exploring beyond our solar system into our galaxy and even beyond that, back to the very beginning of our universe and the big bang."

He added: "It goes back to the basic question that I'm sure everybody's asked when you look at the night sky: how did we turn up here out of all that? That's the kind of question we're tackling on the grand scale in Esa. Venus is just one more step on that route."